“I had before observed that Mr. Robin, though given to a good deal of slang, sometimes went off into strains which I could not understand, and this was one of them, for I had not the remotest idea what he meant by civilization or Bohemian either, and I said so to him, whereupon he laughed again, and told me that the free and easy life I led up the river with Mr. Red and the little Reds, and the jasmines, and Cherokees, and alligators was Bohemian, while it was the very top of civilization and society to be shut up in a gilded cage as I was, with no chance of escape. At the risk of seeming very vulgar and ignorant in his eyes, I told him I liked Bohemian best, even if I had never heard of a cat, and then I questioned him again of that creature, was it a bird, or a beast, or what?’ ‘A _beast_ most decidedly,’ he said; ‘a _vile, ugly beast_,’ and by ugly he meant bad, for he said cats looked well enough, and he had even heard his mistress call one she had ‘a darling little beauty,’ but he did not see it. They had fur instead of feathers, four legs instead of two, with a long streamer behind which was called a tail, and which was anything but handsome. Then they were the natural enemies of birds, which they caught and ate whenever a chance occurred. “‘Eat birds! Eat my little Reds!’ I exclaimed, in horror, and he replied: “‘Yes, quicker than wink if they could get at ’em; and they are so sly and creeping-like that they are upon you before you know it, and they keep us in a constant fret when we are teaching our young ones to fly.’ “‘Then there is something bad even at the North, which you describe as so perfect,’ I said, a little maliciously. “‘Why, yes,’ he answered, slightly crestfallen. ‘We have cats there, but then there’s no place just exactly right, you know. There’s a _cat_ or something everywhere.’ “I knew that ‘by cat or something,’ he meant an annoyance of some kind, and I thought of the yellow jasmines up the river, and said to myself, ‘There’s no cat there;’ and then, when I remembered how Mr. Red had sometimes troubled me with his indolent habits, and his familiar way of talking to that pert Miss Spotted-Wing, I thought that might perhaps have been a cat, or at least a kitten, as Robin said the little cats were called.